1. Field of the Invention
The present invention is in the field of e-commerce, more particularly, Web-based presentation of and interaction with an interactive store, including catalog and shopping cart utilities enabled through Web services.
2. Discussion of the State of the Art
The field of e-commerce, where it relates to online shopping, is continually being developed. In general practice, an online store comprises some Web-based presentation of available merchant products or services and a transaction-capable mechanism for allowing a user to select items and pay for those items online using a credit card or bill pay service.
The online process relates in concept to a physical shopping environment where a shopping cart is used at a store to contain items selected by the user for purchase and wherein those selected items will be “checked out” at the end of the shopping experience.
The inventors are aware of several limitations and problems in the art related to the online shopping experience. One of these is that visual representation of items provided typically by a merchant is lacking, and a conventional online shopping cart provides only a list of items that are placed in the cart. Other problems with current online store environments include a lack of flexibility for visiting multiple storefronts, while using a single utility for aggregating items for purchase (a single shopping cart). Still other limitations have been noted by the inventors, including lack of flexibility for rendering alternate views of items or arranging items into groups or categories for further scrutiny and consideration before purchase.
The inventors are aware of a system for facilitating an online shopping experience. The system among other features includes a shopping cart utility for e-commerce that includes a first workspace for retrieving and storing electronic catalog items; a second workspace for receiving specific ones or combinations of the catalog items; and a device display mechanism for displaying the items and associated item information in one of a thumbnail, collage, or list view. A user may reorder and reposition items in the collage view, and the first and second workspaces are functionally integrated. This system known to the inventors is not at present known to the public.
In the system known to the inventors the workspaces may be cross integrated between catalog or store front product window and the actual shopping cart window, while retaining full shopping cart functionality through to a pending transaction. Using this system a user may enrich the experience by being able to manipulate the area of the shopping cart as a scene or background in which images may be arranged for viewing, mixed and matched resized, replaced with available images of varying SKU attributes, and so on. Other features of this system include standalone utilization of the shopping cart independent of any one specific merchant site, and an ability to share the workspace between multiple users for editing and collaborative buying. Still other functions of the system of importance to merchants include cross sell and up sell access into the cart and an ability of offering a prefilled shopping cart, or to include suggestive items into a shopping cart based on personal knowledge of the shopper and generalized data about shoppers in general.
Still, it has occurred to the inventors that along with flexibility in utility for shopper and merchant accessibility, flexibility in design and look as well as functional improvements in image rendering and in image placement and manipulation are needed to further improve the system for truly user-friendly applications.
Therefore, what is further needed in the art is a system and method for creating and implementing a multi-functional image or collage that can itself be used to initiate and complete client/server communications including transaction processing.